Vertov, Snow, Farocki: Machine Vision and the Posthuman

303 Pages·2013·9.16 MB·English

by  David Tomas

Vertov, Snow, Farocki

Vertov, Snow, Farocki

Machine Vision and the Posthuman
David Tomas
NEW YORK • LONDON • NEW DELHI • SYDNEY
Bloomsbury Academic
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First published 2013
© David Tomas, 2013
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or
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No responsibility for loss caused to any individual or organization acting
on or refraining from action as a result of the material in this publication
can be accepted by Bloomsbury Academic or the author.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Tomas, David
Vertov, Snow, Farocki/David Tomas p.cm
Includes bibliographic references and index.
ISBN 978-1-4411-6915-0 (hardcover)
2012045678
eISBN: 978-1-4411-6393-6

Typeset by Newgen Imaging Systems Pvt Ltd, Chennai, India
For the two Ninas

Contents

Introduction 1
Part I Threshold—When a Ritual Process Speaks of Machine Vision
and Cyborg Prototypes: A Film Document, Circa 1929 13
1 Manufacturing Vision and the Posthuman Circa 1929: Kino-Eye,
The Man with a Movie Camera, and the Perceptual Reconstruction
of Social Identity 15
Part II Enigma of the Central Region—A Microhistory of Machine
Vision and Posthuman Consciousness, Circa 1969–72 75
2 La Région Centrale: Basic Cultural, Technical, and Formal Filiations 77
3 Toward a Cosmic Rite of Passage: External and Internal Locations
and a Play of Authorship 101
4 La Région Centrale: Liminality, Knowledge Production, Pedagogy 127
5 La Région Centrale: From Cosmic to Posthuman Rite of Passage 157
6 De La (1969–71): Authorship, Automation, and the Posthuman 187
7 A Comparative Schematic Analysis of the Automated Narrative
and its Mechanical Logic in Vertov’s The Man with a Movie Camera
(1929) and Michael Snow’s De La (1969–72) 201
Part III The Public Deployment of Machine Vision and the
Programmed Materialization of the Posthuman in
Collective Social Space, Two Early-Twenty-First Century
Video Documents 217
8 A Posthuman Future in the Age of the Algorithm: Harun Farocki’s

Documentation of the Operational Image and its Culture of
Surveillance 219
Notes 255
Bibliography 281
Index 287

Introduction

Occasionally one encounters a metaphor that not only captures the essence of an
individual practice but also summarizes in a provocative manner the functions
and historical significance of a dedicated technology at a specific period in its
development. Dziga Vertov’s metaphor of kinok eyes spinning like propellers
that travel into the future on the wings of hypothesis is a striking example of
this type of image. For the metaphor encapsulates the radical spirit and the
utopian aspirations of this cinematographer’s practice, as well as summarizing,
in a remarkably succinct, yet extraordinarily evocative fashion, the experimental
character, aesthetic, sociopolitical and revolutionary potential of a new
technology (the movie camera) and a new medium (cinema) when used to
promote a working interface between cinematic practice and social revolution.
The metaphor also serves as a concise introduction to Vertov’s The Man with
a Movie Camera, his most important visual statement on cinema’s theoretical
and practical capacity to act as an articulate instrument of experimentation and
revolutionary change.
The metaphor constructs an equation between technologies (movie camera,
airplane), vision (eye), representation (the metaphor itself), perception (eyes
spinning like propellors), space, time, and visual method (flying); and it does so
in a manner that highlights the eye’s—and therefore vision’s—technologically
grounded and open-ended trajectory through reality, and ultimately history.
The metaphor is interesting because of its articulation of biological and
mechanical elements (eyes and propellers), space and time (a movement
through space toward the future), and tools for thinking (hypotheses)—the
latter articulated/embodied in the eye/propeller /airplane /wings metaphor.
This metaphor simultaneously represents the power of thought to construct
a representation of itself as an autonomous “intelligence” that can project
itself beyond itself by taking the form of a compact, compound image. This
image also functions as “tool” of analogical visual thinking and analysis in